Semantic Theory 2022

Overview

Semantic Theory is a core course of the Master of Science programme in Language Science and Technology (LST), taught at the department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University.

This course focuses on the theoretical study of natural language meaning, with explicit links to practical applications. The first part of the course introduces sentence-level (Montague) semantics: starting out from first-order predicate logic and moving to (typed) lambda calculus. In the second part of the course, we zoom in to the level of lexical semantics, in particular focusing on verbs (event semantics) and quantified noun phrases (generalized quantifiers). We then move to discourse-level semantics: based on the framework of Discourse Representation Theory, we study discourse-level phenomena such as anaphora and presupposition. The final part of the course is dedicated to recent advances in semantic theory: we discuss Distributional Formal Semantics, a formalism that extends formal semantics with a distributional component, providing compositional and probabilistic meaning representations that are also suitable for use in contemporary deep learning approaches.

Format and Requirements

See course conditions.

Literature

We will provide weekly additional reading material for each topic, which will be updated throughout the semester. Some important online resources:

• Logic in Action (Ch. 4), Johan van Benthem, Hans van Ditmarsch, Jan van Eijck and Jan Jaspars, 2016.
• Elements of Formal Semantics (Ch. 2 & 3), Yoad Winter, Edinburgh University Press, 2016
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (princial editor).

Leistungspunkte

6 CP